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The Nokia Asha 501’s Fastlane feature makes it easier than ever to access your favourite apps and features, but if you’re new to the phone, deciding which apps are worth downloading can be a daunting task.

We’ve sifted through the thousands of apps on offer to come up with five essential offerings. Read on to find out what they are.

It’s well worth having a news app on your Nokia Asha 501, letting you keep up with what’s going on in the world wherever you go. CNN is one of the best apps currently available for the Asha 501, proving easy to navigate, comprehensive when it comes to all things news, and free to download.

The app provides a range of different sized photograph along with short headlines. Click on a story and you’ll get several bullet points to inform you of what you need to know, with a few paragraphs offering more details. You can also click to read the entire news story if it’s something you’re particularly interested in.

You never know when you may get caught out in the dark, needing a torch to find your keys or just to shed a little light on something. That’s where Pocket Lights Lite comes in. Click the torch button, and it turns the screen on your Nokia Asha 501 bright white, lighting up the way. You can also change the screen to other colours, lighting up the darkness in subtly different hues.

The Weather Channel is a brilliantly simple app. It uses your network connection to figure out where you are in the world, and then it lets you know what the weather is like. Temperature, sun, rain, wind speed – the lot. It’s also possible to get updates for the coming days, keeping you prepared whatever the weather.

If you use a lot of social networks and want to keep shortcuts to the web pages all in one place, you’ll get on well with Sign In. The app contains links to several big social networking sites, including: Facebook, Twitter, Google Translate, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Google Mail, ebuddy, MySpace, hi5, PerfSpot, Bebo, Friendster, Netlog, ShoZu, Flickr, Mig33 and Mocospace. Click on any of the links, and it’ll take you straight to the sign-in page.

If you’re looking for a light-hearted app to have a bit of fun with, Twist Music could be the perfect solution. The app gives you the chance to create your own tunes using different instruments, although you don’t really have full control over the direction the music goes in. You can control just how loud it is, along with altering the pace, by waving your arm (and the Asha 501) around like a loon though, and it’s a lot of fun.